A common mistake when setting the time window is that the asterisks mean “ALL”. If you set the hours at 8-21 and “*” for minutes and seconds, it works out to “ALL seconds of ALL minutes within those hours”. If you want it to end at 9 PM change the hours to “8-20” so it will be active up to 8:59 PM. You might also want to trim the window down a bit by picking a specific value for Seconds like “00” so it won’t fire more than once a minute.
In the Unix world, you rearm the Alerts by touching the default.alrt file. In our system we have cron touch the default.alrt file once an hour.That way you get hourly reminders if the alert condition has not been resolved. I seem to recall Russ Ross posting something not long ago about the way MDACC handles this 🙂